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GlotPress – translating WordPress

I use WordPress quite a lot and was surprised to discover that I knew so little about it’s efforts at Internationalisation. I recently stumbled upon GlotPress, the web software built to make simultaneous, crowd sourced, translation of the WordPress codebase easier and was impressed.

At translate.wordpress.org you can see the projects that are being translated, and by clicking through one can start translating the main codebase, versions, themes – all of the base software projects offered by the WordPress community. There’s a getting started guide that explicitly explains how it works, although the site and software is fairly intuitive.

I have my criticisms though – the GlotPress software itself doesn’t have a good landing or about page – not very friendly to those that want quick information about what it is, how it works and where it can be seen in action. I’m surprised at how few languages are available for some sections, and having the WordCamp theme in the root directory, but the default WordPress theme TwentyEleven inside the WordPress project was confusing at first, although I’d probably make more sense of it if I delved deeper.

It’s certainly doesn’t seem as slick or well developed as Transifex the platform used by Django. Having said that, it obviously works, and is being developed and improved from what I see on the GlotPress blog. Coupled with being fairly intuitive to use, I think this is more important than my criticism. I’m looking forward to see how it develops over time.